5 Ways Martial Arts Training Can Boost Your Career

I often hear from long-time students something that new students may be surprised by. I hear that their training with us at Dark Horse Denver has actually helped in a totally unexpected place: at work. It may seem like learning to defend yourself or how to perform a cross-collar choke doesn’t really apply in your cubicle, nursing station, or job site. And hopefully, you’ll never have to use your BJJ to choke someone at work.

What I’m talking about are the personal development benefits of martial arts training. These 5 benefits will help you become a better manager, a more valuable employee, and a more productive team-member.

1. Focus

Martial arts training, and especially BJJ, is all about focusing on what’s important and ignoring distractions. If you lose focus and miss an important detail, you fail. You get beat. Modern work life is a lot like that: there are so many distractions, incoming emails, and details to remember. Miss one and things go wrong quickly. Maybe you don’t get the project done on time, or the project gets awarded to someone else. Focus is a critical skill, and we work on it every single day.

2. Fearlessness

If you’re constantly held back by fear, it’s tough to be a creative thinker. And it’s tough to aggressively pursue new opportunities. Fearlessness is a great quality in today’s work world. But fearlessness doesn’t come from nowhere, except in children. As adults we know that bad things happen. In order to develop fearlessness you have to start with small, scary actions in a safe environment. Kids learn that if they fall off the jungle gym, someone will take care of them and they won’t die. We work hard at Dark Horse to create that environment. Training realistic martial arts like BJJ are scary and can produce fear. New students are able to go through that fear, and see that they can survive that scary situation intact. And through that, they develop fearlessness. It happens all the time.

3. Dedication

Martial arts are difficult, long-term development projects. For many people, that’s pretty similar to their work life: long-term projects that need persistence and dedication. Showing up to BJJ class three times a week (even when you’re a bit tired or a bit unmotivated) requires dedication. And it builds dedication. The more you do it, the easier it becomes to do it. The dedication we see and develop in our students daily is exactly the kind of thing that will help them go out and tackle big, tough, long projects.

4. Self-Confidence

If there is a more desirable quality in people at work, I don’t know what it is. It’s desirable from the standpoint of a manager, a co-worker, someone in the hiring seat, and even from the workers themselves. Everyone wants and needs more self-confidence. Martial arts training has a history going back thousands of years of making people more self-confident. The more challenging and realistic the martial art, the more self-confidence it provides. Reality based martial arts like BJJ and Judo are on the high-end of the challenge scale and therefore produce self-confidence on the high-end. If you’d like to be more self-confident at work, or any other place, come on down.

5. Continuous Self-Improvement

If there’s one thing employers will tell you, it’s that in any project there’s always room for improvement. Nobody ever gets a perfect employee evaluation, and no project is ever actually rated 5 stars. It’s like that with martial arts as well: there’s always something new to learn, something else to study, some deficiency to work on. It’s not about being an incomplete or sub-par martial artist, it’s about an appreciation for the vast potential that exists out there in the martial arts world. It doesn’t mean you suck, it means there is always something new on the horizon. It’s the same with your career, hopefully. There’s always more you can learn, new skills to add, new areas to explore. The continuous pursuit of new and better is just a natural part of the process.

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